For a moment, Ashfall thought he was still in the frozen world.
The air was sharp in his lungs, the cold biting at the edges of his thoughts. But then everything bent and blurred. The snow, the ruined buildings, the gray sky; all dissolved into a black vastness scattered with distant, pulsing lights.
He blinked once. And suddenly, he was standing in space.
The Stars of Madness were everywhere: dozens, hundreds, stretching endlessly around him like malignant constellations. Each one shimmered not with warmth but with a faint, unsettling pulse, as if something alive was watching from behind the light. He stood on a massive platform made of smooth, dark stone that reflected none of their glow. There was no sound, no air, yet somehow, he could breathe.
"What the hell…?" he muttered under his breath, voice barely a whisper in the vacuum.
He turned around slowly. Behind him stood a human-sized statue, carved in detail. His chest tightened as he recognized it.
It was the same red angel statue that marked the center of the Metropolis—the one tied to the riddle, the one he found together with Calethia. But this version wasn't quite the same.
He walked closer, footsteps echoing faintly on the black stone. The angel's scales were balanced perfectly, but the things it held were different. On one side of the scale sat the red rose, delicate and beautiful even here. On the other a small hourglass, nearly empty, its final grains of sand slipping through the narrow glass neck. With every falling grain, the scale began to tilt, ever so slightly, breaking its fragile balance.
Ashfall's eyes lifted to the angel's other hand. It no longer held the pocket watch he remembered from the statue in the city.
Now, the angel held a pendulum swinging left to right in perfect rhythm, though there was no wind to move it. Its motion was hypnotic, unsettling. The more he stared, the more he felt as if it were swinging inside his own chest.
"What are you supposed to mean…?" he muttered, more to himself than to anything else. "Balance, time, and decay. That's what it always comes back to."
He took a slow breath, feeling a chill that wasn't physical run through him. Something about the angel's still and unreadable expression felt like judgment.
A loud metallic click echoed across the platform, sharp and absolute. Ashfall's eyes darted upward.
He hadn't noticed it before, but mounted around the platform's edges were colossal metallic arms like the skeleton of a gigantic clock. A massive hour hand began to move with a heavy, deliberate motion, its sound vibrating through his bones. In the air around him, glowing Roman numerals appeared, forming a complete circle from I to XII. They hovered, weightless, each symbol pulsing in a eerie blue light.
The hour hand crept slowly, turning first toward I, then II, III, and finally stopping at IV.
A minute hand followed, spinning rapidly before halting around VIII. Both locked into place with a thunderous click.
A sharp pain tore through Ashfall's left eye. He winced, clutching it, feeling his tattoo burn beneath the skin.
It moved. The inner clock etched in his iris rotated and aligned itself perfectly with the positions of the hands on the platform. His heart pounded. It felt like something ancient and mechanical was syncing inside him like he was becoming part of the clock itself.
"What… is this place?" he whispered, though no one could hear him.
Then the air rippled. Words appeared in front of him; floating letters of the same glowing blue light, hanging in the void. They weren't spoken. They simply were, imprinted directly into his vision. Only his left eye could see them.
[Ability Acquired]
[Transformation: 4
[Penalty: Corruption]
[Exclusive Ability Unlocked]
[Living Failure: 1]
[Penalty: ?]
Ashfall stared at the message, unblinking.
His throat was dry.
He'd seen system-like notifications before in advertisements but this felt completely different. There was no guidance, no explanation, no reason why he had been chosen for it. The last line lingered longer than the others, the question mark in Penalty [?] flickering, almost like it was… watching him back.
"Living Failure…?" he repeated quietly. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
The text faded. The glowing numbers dimmed one by one. The pendulum above the angel slowed until it stopped entirely, frozen mid-swing. The final grains of sand fell through the hourglass, and with a faint, delicate tilt, the scales lost their balance.
He felt the world unravel again. Space bent inward, the stars flickered like dying flames, and gravity—or something like it—dragged him down.
When Ashfall opened his eyes again, the cold struck him immediately: he was back in the Ice World.
The wind howled across the ruins, carrying flakes of snow that stung his face. His breath came out in heavy clouds. For a few seconds, he just stood there, disoriented, his mind still spinning from what he had just seen or imagined.
Rhea's voice cut through the wind.
"Are you just going to stand there?" she called, her tone sharp but shaky. She was still barefoot, her skin pale against the snow, but somehow alive as if the cold doesn't really get to her. He turned his head slightly. She was following him, like she had been all along.
Ashfall blinked. To her, it seemed like no time had passed at all. He'd been gone for what? Minutes? Hours? Maybe longer. Yet she looked at him as if nothing strange had happened, as if the world hadn't just bent around him.
She walked up beside him, hugging her arms for warmth, and muttered, "You really know how to pick the worst places to travel, huh?"
He exhaled slowly, running a hand over his face. "Why are you still following me," he said. "Just go live you second life or whatever..."
He glanced up at the gray sky one more time. The Stars of Madness still burned faintly behind the clouds, mocking him with their distant glow. Whatever had just happened, whatever that "Living Failure" meant, he could feel it crawling beneath his skin. Like something had changed inside him, even if he didn't understand what.
And for the first time in a while, Ashfall didn't feel like he was in control of his own story.
He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and started walking through the snow again, Rhea following close behind, her voice carrying over the wind, rambling about anything and everything, as if the silence itself frightened her.
Ashfall didn't answer. His thoughts were elsewhere, circling back to that message in the void.
Transformation. Corruption. Living Failure.
He didn't know what any of it meant. But deep down, he already feared that "failure" wasn't just a title.
It was a prophecy.